Slashdot Mirror
Domain: epinions.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to epinions.com.
Comments · 343
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and for the slightly older reader I recommend...Carl Sagan's _The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark_. Here's links to two different reviews .
Stephen Jay Gould, almost everything he's ever written but particularly The Mismeasure of Man.
Then there's the classic, much older but still frequently cited Charles Mackay's _Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds_ online.
(entire text available courtesy of Gutenberg)
part 1
part 2
part 3 -
Re:That's why we have Kazaa Lite!"- No f*cking Bonzi Buddy"
If you feel like a laugh, check out the Bonzi Buddy site. Just don't go there with IE - the last time I did, it tried to load that Bonzi TROJAN and install it automatically on my machine. (I am safe now that I use linux.)
The scariest part is that some people actually love this steaming pile of sh*t trojan horse software.
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Just as a general 19" CRT suggestion:
The LG Electronics Flatron 915ft (plus) is a the monitor I've recently chosen to purchase. For around $315 after shipping, it allows 1600x1200@85hz (my major consideration), it's truly flat, compares well against the other top-rated 19" monitors in terms of color, and those that have had problems with the monitor, it has had the best record in terms of returns.
A set of Epinions reviews.
It uses a different mask type than any other monitors, from what I've heard, called a "slit mask" - and it does look good. The only real notable feature other than looking good and being really flat is that it avoids the "2 horizontal wires" of the trinitron type monitors.
One final note about the warranty - it's a three year warranty - however, not all the years of it's terms are equal. The two months, you get the traditional swap&replace returns for a new monitor. For the rest of the first year, you get a refurbished monitor back. For the two years after that, you have to mail the monitor to the service company, then wait for the repaired monitor. After that, you've pretty much got to get a new monitor. So, although they have had a good reputation as far as customer service goes so far, know what to expect.
I like it so far, and find it a very good replacement for my last 19" monitor, and worth the extra cash over a 17" or a lower quality 19".
:^)
Ryan Fenton -
The Kick Inside
I wonder if they'll be going after Kate Bush next?
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Re:Just an opinion
Do make very clear your e-mail storage quota, and establish a mechanism for notifying them when they approach that quota (probably just an email message). If possible, have two quotas, one that's an absolute limit and one they get a few days warning on.
Sorry, I know this isn't really a software issue, but it can be a major pain to try and swap important files like PDF documents with people and all of a sudden you are not receiving the messages and, in many cases, the ISP is not even bothering to bounce them back at the sender. It's one of those detail issues you never think of when you start using an ISP (unless you're grizzled) but ends up becoming very important. -
Re:dvd tech is showing its age ..
18Gb would involve flipping the disc, or (nonexistant?) auto-flippers like were available for laserdisc.
The Sony DVP-CX860 will automatically switch to the other side of the dvd and resume playing. -
Good idea, bad idea?Note: I know hardly any of you will read to the bottom of this post, so here's a copy of my sig:
--
m iso socially aware artistic geek pen-pal, m or f, in '1337 edu. jazz, poetry a must.
email me (click my user info for addy) if you're interested.
Now then. Let the games begin.
........
First of all, here's a bit of a rant. Let me disagree strongly with Darko Kirovski, the "cryptography [...] researcher at Microsoft" (article) who created the prototype, when he says:
"I don't think you can create a password that is easily memorizable that is 20 characters long," Kirovski said.
Now, I'm just an average slashdot user. I've never worked with anything that is worth so much as protecting my keyboard from being TEMPEST-ed as I type my password. I'm certainly no cryptography expert.
But even *I* know that you can create easily memorizable passwords 20 characters long, and, in fact, far longer.
First of all, let me introduce you all to diceware. Diceware, slashdot. Slashdot, diceware. (How do you do, how do you do).
Now diceware here is run by a guy who knows about security. He's paranoid. He doesn't just "come up" with passwords while trying to avoid using any obvious components -- oh, no, he generates them completely randomly, and accepts whatever he comes up with as his password. So randomly does he generate his passwords, in fact, that he uses casino dice rather than trusting any kind of hardware.
But wait, it gets better.
How does diceware work? Basically, you use dice to choose a group of short English words that, since they're words (or can be treated as words by a human, such as the "word" ijk), are easy to remember.
More specifically, you roll a die five times, and put the five numbers together and find the corresponding word. (For example, if you roll 2, 6, 3, 1, 5, you search the list for 26315 and find that your word is "Frank").
The only caveat is that before using this list, you should manually (or with a program of your own design) check to make sure 1) that no numerical combination is missing and 2) that no word is associated with more than one combination.
In other words, you shouldn't trust the guy who made diceware, and you don't need to. It's just the principal of the thing -- a list of unique items on a one-to-one ratio with a range of numbers, each of the items of which is easier to remember than a mere number. (But, because there are equally many of them, will be equally "random".)
Now let's do a bit of analysis together of how secure this is.
- Since five die rolls can have 7776 possible combinations (6^5), each "word" has an entropy of just over 12.924 bits. (2^12.924 ~ 7776, so that many bits are necessary to represent each combination five die rolls can create).
- Now, one "character", if we take it to mean an integer with values 0 through 255 inclusive, has entropy of 8 bits.
- Therefore, every two diceware words correspond to three completely random bytes.
Now let's rip apart Kirovski's statement that you can't remember 20 characters.
Before we do, let's point out that no one needs 20 characters, since even if you take a "character" to mean just any of the 94 ASCII values that a user can easily type, we'll even exclude the tab and space, this comes to (6.5545888 bits of entropy per one-of-94-characters * 20 characters=) 131.0917 bits of entropy. That's more than 128 bit encryption needs for a secure key! And this includes only the following characters:
! blah " this # lameness $ filter % really & sucks ' don't ( you ) agree * of + course , you - do . / 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; ? @ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z [ \ ] ^ _ ` a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z { | } ~
Obviously, if you include more in the definition of "character", then the amount of entropy in 20 characters becomes ridiculous.
But for now, let's assume that Kirovski really did mean 20 characters, as I have defined them, or 128 bits of entropy. Is this "easily memorizable"? Sure is, if you use diceware.
For each word, we'll roll a die five times and get 12.92 bits of entropy. This means we need 10 words to get 128 bits.
Here are my results:[4]
65566 35115 24266 14326 54314 63345 41616 12265 44346 56243
I look these up in the word list, and get:
"56 junk elba bleat lard wacky sermon annex one swept"
as my pass-phrase. Is this "easily memorizable"?
Sure is:
- "56k modems are worse junk than what Napoleon had at Elba -- a bleating piece of lard is faster down an incline if you've given it a push, for chrissakes!!" together with the picture of a goat bleating in terror as it rides a chunk of lard down a hill. Also picture the goat in a Napoleon posture (one hoof inside vest) so you remember elba.[5]
- "Wacko tries being a minister: comes up with wacky sermon about how we need to annex canada. I for one think it should be swept under the rug. (the idea advanced by the sermon or canada?
Picture: arm stretching borders of alaska over canda.
It took me less than thirty seconds to come up with vivid pictures for this, then another minute to associate these sentences and pictures with the actual words (bleat for bleating, swept for sweep or sweeping) and if I remind myself of it in a few minutes, then in a few days, then in a week or two, I'll have it known forever. Compare that with memorizing:[6]
JLEwx;+?o9bH`"|6r%Bo
And you see why diceware is a good idea.
The fact that someone who is a supposed expert in this doesn't know about it is in my opinion inexcusable. (Of course, he might know that twenty characters' worth of entropy can easily be made to be memorizable, but his statement does not reflect this.)
Incidentally, it takes me between six and seven seconds to type "56 junk elba bleat lard wacky sermon annex one swept" carefully enough that it's accurate without my checking it as it appears on the screen (I just closed my eyes and did this five times in thirty-one seconds.) And more than twice as long to type the random 20-character word, if I look at the characters as they appear, even though I use every one of those non-alphabetic characters frequently enough to be able to "semi-touchtype it" (might not hit it on the first try, but I know where it is and I don't look at the keyboard -- in fact, I couldn't now because I use a weird international one. [shrug] But semi-touchtyping doesn't help you when you see *'s instead of the characters...)
As for how much security the average person needs (we're not talking 128 bits here):
well, if you consider an 8 character random combinations of A-Z, a-z, and 0-9 that's 5.954196 bits of entropy per letter * 8 letters = 47.6335 bits of entropy, or less than four diceware words' worth. For example,
56 junk elba bleat.
You don't even need spaces (although I find it easier to type with them) since no diceware word includes a space.
Can you believe it, a simple thing like "56 junk elba bleat" being more secure than a completely random 8-letter mixed-case, alphanumeric word? Wow.
Okay, I've run out of steam. That ends my diceware rant, and I'll address this whole nifty picture thing now.
First let me offer these final notes, which didn't fit into my discussion above.
- Note that the 7776 words diceware uses are all short. There are far more than that many common English words, but by including obscure shorter words and semi-words (like numbers), which are less common but equally memorable once you've thought about it / looked it up, the total typing is reduced. However, this leads to:
- Be very sure to accept any words you're given. If you need to look up a word to know what it means, do so. By avoiding words you don't know (rolling again), you reduce entropy.
- Don't change words. If I change "56" to "56k" above, and make that the word in my passphrase, it's not enough that I make sure 56k isn't already one on the list: I need to make sure that none of the other 7776 words are ones I might change to 56k if I roll them. In other words, just don't change words.
Okay. Rant ends here.
........
Back on topic:
From the article: "The key -- images, which tend to make more of an impression on people than strings of text characters."
This is true, but it is equally true that it is more difficult to uniquely identify member of a given set of pictures than it is to identify a member of a given set of words.
Picture the face of the last high school English teacher that taught you. Now, this is a fine part of a password, because you can choose it randomly from a large list of objects (people you know), and you will remember that it's your password. (Or rather, it and a few more like it).
That is, if I told you that of the 2000 people you know, the following eight faces, in that order, are now your password, you will have very little difficulty remembering them and their order.
However, how will you make a selection 8 times from one of 2000 people? Supposing you know their names also, you can alphabetically list four at a time, doing a double-binary search (for example, A-M at the top, M-Z at the bottom, and the right side is the upper half of each of these ranges and the left side is the lower half).
You now need to make 5.482892 selections to select each of your 8 faces. That's 43 mouse clicks, each one followed by scanning four faces.
Of course, this is based on knowing the names associated with each face, and it would be easier just to type those in. In which case we're back to diceware.
If you don't know their names, however, just how will you select from 2000 faces? Well, maybe you can mimic the binary search with a selection from characteristic skin color, eye shape, etc. If you spend a few hours learning "human facial classification", I bet you can select just about any face you recall in eight or nine mouse clicks.
However, I doubt most people would be too keen on learning to input a bunch of characteristic features. (Even if the 2000 people aren't really people, but people from "Guess who?", who have either a large or small nose, either are wearing a hat or aren't, etc.[7])
The more specific method the article mentions, selecting a particular pixel range within a person's face, isn't something that people do on a daily basis (so much as memorizing and recognizing faces is), so I doubt most people could remember whether it's Mary's lower-right lip followed by where a dimple would be on her right cheek, then the middle of her left eyebrow, or the other way around. It's just not doable.
Okay, I need to go now. Enjoy the weekend, all.
~lts.
You can skip step (1) if you make a contract with yourself that if you ever roll a combination that for some reason isn't on the list, you will take the time to make word that is not on the list, and use that instead.
We'll note that hardly anyone uses the full ascii set, including control characters, in their passwords, but I suppose it's possible to use every character besides carriage return (and maybe even that), depending on the implementation.
There are only 96 keyable characters in the ASCII standard before all the international extentions and so forth, which include the tab and the space.
[4] If you want, you can follow along (and see that I didn't artificially select a particularly easy combination):
#include "iostream.h"
#include "stdlib.h"
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
cout << "Unseeded demo. NON-SECURE!"
(You can add indentation, I remove it because of the lameness filter.)
[5] Napolean's last battleground, I guess. Famous palindrome: "able was I ere I saw elba".
[6] this example from unseeded:
for(int i = 0; i < 20; i++) cout << char(rand() % 94 + '!');
cout << endl;
[7]On an aside, I figured out binary searching all on my own in playing Guess Who as a child. I figured out that the most efficient way of ending up with the opponent's person is, at each question, to pick a characteristic that only exactly half of my remaining choices had -- sometimes this involved making up questions like: "Okay, does your person EITHER have a hat OR a moustache (or both?). Yes or no?"
(Actually, I soon realized that I could get an answer faster by saying "does your person have any of the following:", for that particular form of the question, but that doesn't apply to all boolean expressions I asked).
--
m iso socially aware artistic geek pen-pal, m or f, in '1337 edu. jazz, poetry a must. - Since five die rolls can have 7776 possible combinations (6^5), each "word" has an entropy of just over 12.924 bits. (2^12.924 ~ 7776, so that many bits are necessary to represent each combination five die rolls can create).
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MS dosen't need help to look bad.
Id really like to know what brought this to MS's attention. It's puzzling that MS would have one of it's own doors closed (i.e. letting people play XBOX's...) in order to stop Sony.
...Unless, of course, they realized that this situation would be to their advantage - It might cover, say, a tendancy for the Xbox to break down, or maybe some complaints about their controllers? I mean, it's kind of hard to rig things when you give the people the controllers, isen't it? - And, of course, I'm sure that MS wasen't demoing buggy prerelease games, or anything else to try and make it look like the PS2 isen't stomping all over the Xbox in the 'Total games released' catagory, and they COULD have just handed the controllers over to the audience like Sony was doing... But it was against show policy! Sure! Yeah. -
Re:Nintendo NEEDS SquareSoft...
> The titles, regardless of fun factor, are always extremely well polished.
Not all of them... Did anyone ever play superman on the n64? -
Slashdot bias
Would slashdot have us believe that this is not the case in the USA? I think its pretty clear that many people are expressing dissatisfaction with products and actually getting away with it. Check epinions as an example.
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Re:Noise cancelling headsets...I fully agree. My NC headphone experiences can be summed up as follows:
- SONY MBR-NC20
Good cancelling. Excellent in machine rooms and labs. Comfortable and easy to wear on a flight. - Panasonic (about 80$)
Insurance company bought these as a replacement for the NC20's. Not impressed. The build quality is noticably worse and the cancellation is poor as well. These headphones do not sit well on your head and are uncomfortable in a matter of minutes. - David Clark H10-13XL
Big passive attenuation with ANC as well. Very comfortable. I can wear these all day, sadly, you can't really plug your MP3 player into these and you'd look a bit daft on the tube in these.
- SONY MBR-NC20
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Re:Noise cancelling headsets...I fully agree. My NC headphone experiences can be summed up as follows:
- SONY MBR-NC20
Good cancelling. Excellent in machine rooms and labs. Comfortable and easy to wear on a flight. - Panasonic (about 80$)
Insurance company bought these as a replacement for the NC20's. Not impressed. The build quality is noticably worse and the cancellation is poor as well. These headphones do not sit well on your head and are uncomfortable in a matter of minutes. - David Clark H10-13XL
Big passive attenuation with ANC as well. Very comfortable. I can wear these all day, sadly, you can't really plug your MP3 player into these and you'd look a bit daft on the tube in these.
- SONY MBR-NC20
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Re:Is it just me...
Well, not quite a high-powered laser, but some of you might remember the controversial shoot the crap out of the iMac Epinions ad.
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Re:They are USB.
.. And they are ugly.
Tom's seems to think that microsoft has done some amazing things with their controllers but it doesn't look so new to me. I'd like to examine this claim by claim.
They[Analog sticks] can be easily operated with the two thumbs, and their excellent progressiveness proved to be better than on the PS2 pad.
Mmmm.. Progressiveness, this is always what I look for in an analog stick. I've used XBox and DualShock2 controllers and they do have a different feel to them, although I don't have a progressamomater to measure which is superior. I find that individual games are more resposible for the movement and response than the actual controller. To be honest, both feel to be a high quality, but I'd still give the edge to teh Dual Shock for it's smaller size and also because the controller is almost totally symetrical, and it makes good use of extra fingers with the R + L 1-3 buttons.
The digital direction pad with its cavities and its bumps is as good.
Here, I would have to agree. I don't much care for the "d-pad" design. But it's still needed for tekken anyway.
The two triggers are also analog, which will be a plus for all the automotive games. There too, the superiority over the PS2 pad is obvious.
Right, because having two triggers w/ analog capability is far superior to ALL of the buttons on the dual shock w/ 255 levels of sensitivity. How many levels does the XBox have again? Where's that obvious superiority?
I'll tell you what superiority I can see for automotive games.. It's called Gran Turismo. It was the best on PS1, now it's better. More cars, higher res models, great physics, better interface and oh yeah, it's owned by SCEA. Don't think it'll be coming to XBox anytime soon, and Project Gotham sucks.
I'm pretty dissapointed in Tom's w/ this review. It seems obvious that these people are not real gamers. From the reading it also seemed to be pretty much written from a microsoft marketing package that probably came with the demo unit. Stephane, Stephane, Jerome and Roland shouldn't be writing about things they have little or no experience with.
If people are looking for good reviews on the systems, check them out for yourself. Coconuts and wal-mart have xbox and ps2 systems up and running all over the place. Or if you must rely on others, at least look to peer reviews. Epinions.com has over 300 reviews for both and you'll be likely to get an honest review when you listen to someone who will never be getting a free lunch, demo unit, or any other kind of perk for giving a good review. -
Its not the battles, it's not the action...What made STAR WARS a great film is that it was a synthesis of all the aspects of moviemaking, not only special effects space battles, but polt, acting, a great script, and even the details like music (try to imagine STAR WARS witout that glorious theme!), and even the credits: think about the famous screen crawl at the start of the film.
But the heart and soul of STAR WARS is undeniably the characters: rakish Han Solo the rogue with a heart of gold, trading insults with spunky Princess Leia, so beautiful and so brave; gung-ho Luke Skywalker, the hero right out of Joseph Campbell, who manages to be annoying and inspiring at the same time; even characters like R2-D2 and Chewbacca, who don't have a coherent line in the script, are developed as recognizable personalities! A cast straight out of Shakespeare or Dickens is what makes Lucas' film an immortal classic.
Don't get me wrong, Space battles and lightsaber duels are great, but let's hope Lucas is able to inject some life into the two-dimensional caricatures who pranced around onscreen during Episode I (name three differences between Obi-Wan and Kwi-Gon-Jinn's personalities, or for that matter, between Obi-Wan and Queen Amidiala), otherwise those of us for whom the STAR WARS flame burns bright in our hearts may be in for another ho-hum prequel.
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Other Nex II reviews...
This is for all of you who don't have google-equipped browsers.
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some insights from a ranger pal of mineI was discussing the film with a former Army Ranger who was invited to the premiere in D.C. He moved on to fly choppers a year or two before the Somalia fubar, but not before he recieved combat wings for Panama, as well as some nifty ribbons for Desert Storm.
His assessment was that the story was about as accurate as Hollywood is with other such historic subject matter. Many of the timelines and events were either compressed, attributed to a single character, or abbreviated. Such is to be expected when you reduce 2 months of bad planning and a 15 hour fire-fight into 2.5 hours.
While he was very complimentary of the technical accuracy, the portrayal of Ranger moxy and the fast-paced action, he did wish the film would have hammered a bit more at the mismanagement that created cluster-*uck e.g. Les Aspin turning down requests to send in armor & air support because of "how it would look" (see links below).
boston herald
That said, he's all for seeing it again as a bunch of us do a men's night this week
BTW, here's a review I read on Epinions that includes some quotes and some of the order of battle from the book, Black Hawk Down
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Re:You Drink Salt Water?
Nor to me, either. I have visions of this happening, only much much worse...
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Re:XPlay?
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Less eye strain
Stop looking at p0rn.
Serisously, I agree that a good chair and monitor are a godsend.
I just picked up this AOC LM-700 LCD. It's bright, clear, easy on the eyes, lightweight, and takes up little deskspace. It's a perfect monitor for coding & LAN parties! -
Re:Review something useful, willya???
Almost there.
Game consoles have Component Video outputs, too, and I could tell the difference between composite, S, and component video on my PS2.
The only component (other than my TV itself) I've found that has more than one CV input (without costing $2k) is this one:
Kenwood VR-510
prices and (glowing, possibly astroturfed) reviews
I got the $399 one; $27 for ground shipping. It should arrive early this week.
--Blair
"No, I did need a new receiver, too." -
seti is bunk
seti is bunk (article i posted on epinions a year ago)
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My Ultralite review
I wrote a review for the japanese equivalent to
the NEC Ultralite for epinions.com a month ago,
check it out at:
http://www.epinions.com/content_47934312068
About availability, neither CompUSA nor Frys stock
NEC notebooks. Apparently the only way
NEC is able to currently sell their
notebooks is through their own website...
Is this true for Fujitsu as well?
Is there are particular reasons for this? -
Re:Let's do some math....not to mention:
- SETI is assuming that someone is actually sending a signal that we can pick up. have we sent such signals? twice. both very directed and both for a very short time. sending an omni-directional signal is insanely expensive. would the governments of earth ever allow such a waste of resources? than how can we assume that someone else would?
- the more advanced the civilization, the more likely it is to self-destruct. look how many times we've come close. and it'll only get worse. there may be only a 200-300 year window during which a civilization is advanced enough to both send and pick up signals
- we're assuming that an ET would even bother developing radio waves. what if their atmosphere was such that radio communications on their planet wouldn't have worked? what if their mass communication was done using seismic waves and by the time they got off their globe they were using targetted light beams?
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Re:Radio controlled electronic bee?
I believe that was the live-action Richie-Rich movie... although there have been others, I think.
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Re:LCD Tangent... IBM CRT Tangent
Since we broke into the conversation, Has anyone used the IBM 275 20" (19.8) Flat
1920x1440@75Hz I found one good review on it but nothing else. I would like one for christmas?? but I haven't been able to get a review from a source I know.
I was comparing it to the Mitsubisi 200 Diamond Plus Natural Flat
22" (20") 1800x1440@72 Hz -
Minocular - $159 - see in the dark
This is what I plane to get my geek bf, if I can afford it!
Night Owl Optics Cyclops Compact NOCC3 -
My own experiences
UPS definitely sucks.
My first bad experience with them involved shipping a ham radio antenna to someone. Because I did not have a tube big enough to pack it in, I took the antenna to Mailboxes Etc and had them pack and ship it via UPS. The short story is that the person I sent it to received nothing but an empty tube with no end on it. Because the antenna was only worth about $99, I got that amount back from UPS, but I was still incredulous that the package got to him empty. Think of how many peoples' hands that tube had to have passed through, completely empty, with no cap on it. Not one of them thought "hmmm, this isn't right."
More recently, my roommates and I have had immensely irritating problems with packages being shipped to the wrong address. We live at 133 "this street." Somehow, one in five things that are shipped to us is delivered to 133 "that street," which is around the corner. Unfortunately, the place that these things end up is a hospital, so we have to wait for them to return the package to the shipper and then for the shipper to re-send it. AND hope that UPS doesn't misdeliver it again. I have complained about this over and over. Nothing ever changes. Our driver also seems to like to claim that he made a delivery and we "weren't home," even though we were here at the time specified, and no "missed delivery" notes were left.
For some truly impressive horror stories, see E-pinions. -
I withhold no judgement. I did play it.
Here's a review I wrote on the thing when I messed with it at E3, and then added onto once I played with it again at the Tokyo Game Show, and screwed with it when I could find a working kiosk.
XBox Review
Scroll to the bottom of the review for all the new info.
Here's a first look review of Dead or Alive 3, as well.
DOA3 Preview -
I withhold no judgement. I did play it.
Here's a review I wrote on the thing when I messed with it at E3, and then added onto once I played with it again at the Tokyo Game Show, and screwed with it when I could find a working kiosk.
XBox Review
Scroll to the bottom of the review for all the new info.
Here's a first look review of Dead or Alive 3, as well.
DOA3 Preview -
Marble Mouse
I bought a Logitech Marble Mouse to play trackball games in MAME. I liked it so much I bought another and use them all day long on my desktop and laptop. The laptop one has a few dings in the ball, but I'm not sure if that's from travel damage or my toddler chewing on it. If it gets a little dirty and starts sticking or flaking out (about once every 2 weeks), I pop the ball out and wipe the bearings and sensor with my finger. I get a lot less wrist strain than I used to with a regular mouse. The worst part is that the movement can be a little coarse and unpredictable when you're trying to do things like precise brushwork in Photoshop or sniping with a railgun in Quake. That's because the pattern on the ball isn't completely uniform. In 99% of what I do, I don't notice it though. When I need precision, I've got a USB Wacom pad & mouse I use.
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Re:Handspring?I doubt it will work on the HandSpring, the OS is burnt onto ROM. from what I gathred, it can be patched with software, but not completely upgraded, the same (you'd think) would hold true if one wanted to replace the palm OS with linux:
here, and here.Someone please correct me if I'm wrong about this, I've got a visor I'd love to try it out on.
(1) Technical sounding language,
(2) Credibility by association, and -
Two reviews.
A couple of my friends got to see previews, and wrote reviews. One saw it at the Squaresoft employee viewing, and the other caught it a couple days ago:
Review #1
Review #2
So far, this is sounding like a far cooler movie than Tomb Raider, and that went over $100 million. So hopefully this does as well. -
Two reviews.
A couple of my friends got to see previews, and wrote reviews. One saw it at the Squaresoft employee viewing, and the other caught it a couple days ago:
Review #1
Review #2
So far, this is sounding like a far cooler movie than Tomb Raider, and that went over $100 million. So hopefully this does as well. -
Interesting, but...
People don't tend to fork over larger amounts of cash for smaller payments. A lot of the Asian video stores I used to rent movies from (I use netflix.com now.) would charge you $50 to rent a video from them before they'd let you open an account. Then all the rentals you made after that were debited from your original $50.
Most of those stores aren't around anymore, because people hate doing that. There's this psychological barrier that customers have to overcome. They start thinking, "Am I really going to use $10 worth of this content?"
Now this works really good for the pr0n industry, because there are certain brain circumventing hormones at work there, including the well documented powers of L.I.B.F. (Lust Induced Brain Freeze.) Nobody ever goes, man, I need some hot humor, now! (Or if they do, they need help.)
But I dunno, maybe something like that would work...but it'd also require a whole different set-up, and putting up the infrastructure for that is going to run someone some cash, too... -
My experience with the GBA, and The Worm Light.
So far, I've found that the only way to play the GBA that isn't in the sunlight, or that force me to become a contortionist is under multiple light sources. Like the chandelier in my dining room works great.
Here's what will happen if you try and use it with a Worm Light.
And here are my impressions of the system in general.
If they were just going to make it so you couldn't see...they should let you hook it to a TV or something. -
My experience with the GBA, and The Worm Light.
So far, I've found that the only way to play the GBA that isn't in the sunlight, or that force me to become a contortionist is under multiple light sources. Like the chandelier in my dining room works great.
Here's what will happen if you try and use it with a Worm Light.
And here are my impressions of the system in general.
If they were just going to make it so you couldn't see...they should let you hook it to a TV or something. -
My Own Little Experiment.
After heading to E3, I decided to put up a review about the dismal performance Microsoft XBox put up. After seeing the "mainstream" gaming press try and spin the XBox off as hot shit, I figured, what better way to test this micro-ad thingy?
So, I've put my own targeted ad up. The XBox should be riding an immense wave of hype after E3, the build-up was huge, so tone of people will be searching for the information...will I get hits?
Here's my review of the XBox, in case you want to see what the real gaming public thinks of the XBox's E3 performance: XBox Review here.
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Unfair criticism! Give Kubrick a chance![This was originally posted waaaay down in the discussion, in response to another comment, but I'm hoping it might be seen better as a parent thread of its own. All the Kubrick bashing here saddens me, and I'd like to try to speak against the herd here...]
Show me another story by Clark or Kubrick with many meaningful anagrams and I'd be willing to believe they were hiding them here.
Kubrick used them all the time! Just to give a few after a bit of Googling:
Check out Dr Strangelove for some great examples. Among other things, there is a scene where Peter Sellers, in the role of the British captain Mandrake, plays around with variations on the letters P. O. E., trying to figure out the code to call back the planes. One relevant POE phrase would be "peace on earth", which is exactly what he was trying to save.
Consider the drug Alex is given in "Clockwork Orange" -- CRM-114. CRM is, of course, a SeRuM, so the name fits. CRM-114 is also the license plate of the car Alex & his gang go joyriding in, as well the name of the radio on the B-52 in Strangelove, the serial number of Discovery in 2001, and in Eyes Wide Shut is a hospital room -- "C [r[oo]m] 114" (and it shows up in other movies too, like "Back to the Future", but that's an aside).
In Kubrick's version of "Lolita", he has a character named Vivian Darkbloom, an anagram for Vladimir Nabokov -- the author that wrote the original book.
In Eyes Wide Shut, there are a lot of examples of anagrams, puns, & general word play. A password is "fidelio", echoing the Latin for 'faithful' as well as an opera by Beethoven (which involved similar themes as EWS).
Or consider the much debated connection between "HAL" and "IBM." Maybe a coincidence, maybe not, but the connection is strong enough to resonate with people.
Or consider the very famous scene from "The Shining", where the kid walks around shouting "RED RUM! RED RUM!", which is of course "MURDER" backwards.
You might not accept all of these examples. Fair enough. I know many of them aren't anagrams per se, but puns, allusions, and so on. So be it. I hope the pattern is clear enough all the same. Kubrick infused his movies with a lot of word play, and this all contributes to the larger meaning of each film. Did he do it deliberatey? I don't doubt that at least some of it was deliberate, but I also accept that a lot of it was probably done unconsciously -- the meaning may be there but perhaps not deliberately so. That's fine with me. But it's there all the same. That's what makes his films great.
As for the hexagonal exhaust thing, well, I can't really comment much on that one. It's worth noting though that, as the movie's FAQ page notes, food is a big symbol in 2001. The early apes feast on raw meat, while the early space travellers have increasingly bland foods, up through the pastey goo that Discovery's crew gets. It's not unreasonable to take that thread a bit burther & comment on how the 2nd monolith had "no meat", or about Discovery's "anus". Certainly our overreliance on technology is a big theme, and the fact that space travellers need machines even to eat & defecate is a very potent symbol to work into a movie like this.
Cut the guy some slack. I haven't read the critique in question, but this review & these comments are being way too harsh. Kubrick's films in general, and 2001 in particular, are a rich source of allegory. Just because you only wanna dwell on the techno-nerd aspects doesn't mean that the larger themes aren't there. Come out of your cubicle & look at the bigger picture. One of the articles on the Kubrick FAQ draws comparisons between the director and James Joyce, and they seem to be about spot on to me. Among other parallels, it cites a common use of puns (cf. examples above et al), encoded meanings (POE from Strangelove, "NO MEAT" from 2001, etc), portmanteau words (compound or layered meaning), and of course both of them set their masterpieces against the Homerian epic poem.
Is it too easy to find these kinds of patterns everywhere? I dunno, maybe, but who cares? Patterns are fun! Whether or not they were "deliberately placed", like the lunar monolith (a ha! another one!), they exist and are being found. Deny them if you want to, but it's much more fun to try to figure out what they mean. I'd be willing to give this book a shot, if it could go any deeper than the critical interpretations I've already read on Kubrick & 2001.
Hell, the Slashdot groupthink crowd has dismissed it, so it must be good!
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Re:Reading too much into stuff...
Show me another story by Clark or Kubrick with many meaningful anagrams and I'd be willing to believe they were hiding them here.
Kubrick used them all the time! Just to give a few after a few minutes of Googling:
Check out Dr Strangelove for some great examples. Among other things, there is a scene where Peter Sellers, in the role of the British captain Mandrake, plays around with variations on the letters P. O. E., trying to figure out the code to call back the planes. One relevant POE phrase would be "peace on earth", which is exactly what he was trying to save.
Consider the drug Alex is given in "Clockwork Orange" -- CRM-114. CRM is, of course, a SeRuM, so the name fits. CRM-114 is also the license plate of the car Alex & his gang go joyriding in, as well the name of the radio on the B-52 in Strangelove, the serial number of Discovery in 2001, and in Eyes Wide Shut is a hospital room -- "C [r[oo]m] 114" (and it shows up in other movies too, like "Back to the Future", but that's an aside).
In Kubrick's version of "Lolita", he has a character named Vivian Darkbloom, an anagram for Vladimir Nabokov -- the author that wrote the original book.
In Eyes Wide Shut, there are a lot of examples of anagrams, puns, & general word play. A password is "fidelio", echoing the Latin for 'faithful' as well as an opera by Beethoven (which involved similar themes as EWS).
Or consider the much debated connection between "HAL" and "IBM." Maybe a coincidence, maybe not, but the connection is strong enough to resonate with people.
Or consider the very famous scene from "The Shining", where the kid walks around shouting "RED RUM! RED RUM!", which is of course "MURDER" backwards.
You might not accept all of these examples. Fair enough. I know many of them aren't anagrams per se, but puns, allusions, and so on. So be it. I hope the pattern is clear enough all the same. Kubrick infused his movies with a lot of word play, and this all contributes to the larger meaning of each film. Did he do it deliberatey? I don't doubt that at least some of it was deliberate, but I also accept that a lot of it was probably done unconsciously -- the meaning may be there but perhaps not deliberately so. That's fine with me. But it's there all the same. That's what makes his films great.
As for the hexagonal exhaust thing, well, I can't really comment much on that one. It's worth noting though that, as the movie's FAQ page notes, food is a big symbol in 2001. The early apes feast on raw meat, while the early space travellers have increasingly bland foods, up through the pastey goo that Discovery's crew gets. It's not unreasonable to take that thread a bit burther & comment on how the 2nd monolith had "no meat", or about Discovery's "anus". Certainly our overreliance on technology is a big theme, and the fact that space travellers need machines even to eat & defecate is a very potent symbol to work into a movie like this.
Cut the guy some slack. I haven't read the critique in question, but this review & these comments are being way too harsh. Kubrick's films in general, and 2001 in particular, are a rich source of allegory. Just because you only wanna dwell on the techno-nerd aspects doesn't mean that the larger themes aren't there. Come out of your cubicle & look at the bigger picture. One of the articles on the Kubrick FAQ draws comparisons between the director and James Joyce, and they seem to be about spot on to me. Among other parallels, it cites a common use of puns (cf. examples above et al), encoded meanings (POE from Strangelove, "NO MEAT" from 2001, etc), portmanteau words (compound or layered meaning), and of course both of them set their masterpieces against the Homerian epics.
Is it too easy to find these kinds of patterns everywhere? I dunno, maybe, but who cares? Patterns are fun! Whether or not they were "deliberately placed", like the lunar monolith (a ha! another one!), they exist and are being found. Deny them if you want to, but it's much more fun to try to figure out what they mean.
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Re:x.org?
On a tangentially related note, x.com was formerly used by a really sucky online bank, known for screwing its customers by freezing their accounts for no good reason and putting them in a Kafka-esque nightmare trying to deal with their bureaucracy to get them unfrozen, as well as changing their terms of service constantly without notice to impose minimum balances, fees, etc. where none existed before. Then they suddenly left the banking business, causing customers' checks to bounce as the accounts became unavailable and "the check was in the mail" to the customers to eventually get their balance back. Now they own PayPal and are running that service in much the same screwball manner. Read some horror stories in sites like Epinions.
I don't know how they managed to get that single letter domain, but they don't seem to really be using it any more; it just redirects to the PayPal site now.
--Dan -
Eeeeeeek...From their FAQ: The RAQ runs RedHat Linux 2.0.34
That should tell you something right there. I think they mean RedHat 6.0 with kernel 2.0.34 installed?
The Cobalt Linux implementation is as secure as any commercial Unix implementation on the market today. Linux was developed with publicly reviewable source code, and as such, has been subjected to a tremendous amount of security testing. In our opinion, as a provider of internet services, our server is more secure and stable than Microsoft Windows NT.
Sure it was, four or five months ago. Things change.
An individual with enough computing power and 'hacking' expertise could crack a password and gain access to the system. Such an individual, in order to crack the password, would also need direct access to the network that the RAQ administrator uses to access the RAQ. Once again, this feature is inherent to nearly all Unix systems.
But, uh, if the machine is relatively secure, how exactly is the attacker going to get to
The RAQ II server uses Sendmail 8.8.8.
Errrrrgh...
I think what you've got is an ISP that will start you off with a server that was secure a few months ago (or currently, raise your hand if you think they check). They leave you responsible for hardening it and most likely give no support whatsoever... Well, at least not free support. A lot of co-location companies are doing that.
I hate to plug, but if you're looking for another dedicated provider, I would try Rackspace. They start you off with a pretty secure server with all the latest packages and will apply a patch for you, help you, or do any work of that type for free.
But, here are a few sites that will help you get familiar with Linux security:
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Hope this helps...
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P2P Summary: The Audience is the Show
P2P lives, not because of it being a cool technology, but because it brings to realization an important fact. There are a number of niches where the audience, or the users, are the best content.
I'll take the broad definition of "peer-to-peer" here and say that in the realm of things that are legal, P2P has the most impact in the following areas:
In the idea space, when the consumer voice is just as important, or more important than a singular voice. For example, product review sites like Epinions. A mass of users can provide far more information on a wider variety of topics than Consumer Reports can.
In hobbies, where there isn't profitability in commercialization. For example, KLOV, the Killer List of Arcade Games. You've got a large number of enthusiastic collectors who are documenting information about games that have long since lost any commercial value.
In dark legal areas, where a commercial entity cannoy provide what the audience wants. MP3s are the best example. There isn't a place (commercial or not) to go to get your MP3s. Peer to peer is the place to go.
In short, peer-to-peer fills in the gaps where commercial organizations do not exist, can not exist, or do their job poorly. And because that is always going to exist, so will peer-to-peer. -
I'd do it
I wouldn't throw out my current servers, but I would certainly favor boxes that were otherwise equal but used less power. Why?
1) Why be wasteful? Just because you can afford to do something doesn't mean you should. I pay about 5% more to use 100% renewable power. (Before the latest crisis, I paid 20% less.)
2) It's cheaper. Even under moderate assumptions, you could save a couple thousand dollars a year for a medium-sized commercial web site. That money would be much better spent on more hardware. Or more beer.
3) It's cooler. Not in the sense of hipness, but in terms of temperature. If the Register's numbers for a dual-Itanium server power consumption are to be believed, a couple of those babies would put out more heat as a hair dryer or a space heater.
Judging by Athalon's heat output, the heat output of typical CPUs scales 1:1 with speed. A lot of server rooms I enter are already running a little warm; imagine what it will be like after a round of upgrades to faster and hotter boxes.
Maybe you can afford to pay for the electricity, but can you afford to pay for a massive upgrade to your air conditioning? -
Why bother with the S560?Not that Sony is respectable, but I buy all their electronics anyway...
You could have saved a few bucks and went with the S360, which also has an optical out. Any decent receiver will also have Dolby digital decoding, so the builtin capabilities of the 560 are wasted (not to mention the degradation of analog signal from the player to the speakers via receiver).
Nobody is really going to agree -- some people will tell you to get some piece of crap Korean thing, others will tell you to get the overpriced status symbol garbage like B&O, and some of them will say you should go to the local snob shop and pick up some spendy handcrafted so-called "audiophile" no-name brand. Check out:
http://www.epinions.com
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I didn't believe it at first...
... but AtariDatacenter may be right. I'm posting only because I have an established history on Slashdot and absolutely zero connection to AtariDatacenter or redir.
Consider this a neutral third party observation to document something before it can be changed.
From http://www.reviewboard.com/Section/Cover/E4500, paragraph two:
The Sun E4500 is not a cheap machine, base configuration usually comes in at around $75k and when configured to suit its usual purpose (enterprise class transaction servers) the bill sometimes tops $100k.
From http://www.epinions.com/enth-review-5999-27A4508B
- 39906C31-prod5, paragraph 1:The Sun E4500 is not a cheap machine, base configuration usually comes in at around $75k and when configured to suit its usual purpose (enterprise class transaction servers) the bill sometimes tops $100k.
The Epinions date is listed as Aug 8 2000. No date was available for the reviewboard article. The Epinions author (nightfall) is not the same author as the disputed E10000 article (jmccorm).
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I didn't believe it at first...
... but AtariDatacenter may be right. I'm posting only because I have an established history on Slashdot and absolutely zero connection to AtariDatacenter or redir.
Consider this a neutral third party observation to document something before it can be changed.
From http://www.reviewboard.com/Section/Cover/E4500, paragraph two:
The Sun E4500 is not a cheap machine, base configuration usually comes in at around $75k and when configured to suit its usual purpose (enterprise class transaction servers) the bill sometimes tops $100k.
From http://www.epinions.com/enth-review-5999-27A4508B
- 39906C31-prod5, paragraph 1:The Sun E4500 is not a cheap machine, base configuration usually comes in at around $75k and when configured to suit its usual purpose (enterprise class transaction servers) the bill sometimes tops $100k.
The Epinions date is listed as Aug 8 2000. No date was available for the reviewboard article. The Epinions author (nightfall) is not the same author as the disputed E10000 article (jmccorm).
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Re:WHAT THE **HELL**. PLEASE MOD THIS UP.Hey, this guy's review of the E10k isn't the first one that he duped. Although the articles are less plagiarized, entire sentences and paragraphs are stolen. He does have some nice pictures, though. I can't conclusively prove that they're different articles, but it does help AtariDatacenter's claim.
Sun Enterprise 450 Server:
Epinions.com
ReviewBoard.com
Sun Enterprise 4500 Server:
Epinions.com
ReviewBoard.com
The latter article on RB seems as though it's being modified as I write this -- the META tag (which could mean anything) is stamped ten minutes ago. In fact, the article is no longer listed on their site! It was obviously there if I found it. Fortunately, I grabbed a snapshot of the articles and I have them posted here:
Saved review of the E450 Saved review of the E4500. Please don't Slashdot my poor cable modem! -
Re:WHAT THE **HELL**. PLEASE MOD THIS UP.Hey, this guy's review of the E10k isn't the first one that he duped. Although the articles are less plagiarized, entire sentences and paragraphs are stolen. He does have some nice pictures, though. I can't conclusively prove that they're different articles, but it does help AtariDatacenter's claim.
Sun Enterprise 450 Server:
Epinions.com
ReviewBoard.com
Sun Enterprise 4500 Server:
Epinions.com
ReviewBoard.com
The latter article on RB seems as though it's being modified as I write this -- the META tag (which could mean anything) is stamped ten minutes ago. In fact, the article is no longer listed on their site! It was obviously there if I found it. Fortunately, I grabbed a snapshot of the articles and I have them posted here:
Saved review of the E450 Saved review of the E4500. Please don't Slashdot my poor cable modem! -
more oddness.I distinctly remember it saying 12/29/2000. I went back to check the it later and it said 03/29/2000. Shoulda checked the cache first
I wondered about the 480Mhz CPUs too cuz I've never heard of them. Really made me curious since we lose a 400 just about every week due to "e-cache writeback parity error" and there's never been a mention of "try the 480's" in any meetings or from our Sun reps to my knowledge. I asked a couple guys at werk and noone knew anything about 'em.
Has anyone tried to contact the epinions.com authors of the 450 and 4500 reviews? This E450 epinion (posted June 27, 2000) is quite similar to the reviewboard E450 posting. Likewise, this E4500 epinion (Aug 8, 2000) might as well be reviewboard's E4500 post. I believe both epinions were posted at times when the reviewboard posts were supposed to be unavailable.